Vet visit was a success! We confirmed all the babies&acute; sexes and gave the mites infested pigs their 3rd dose of ivermectin. We also cleaned out two impacted boars (YUMMY!).

The sickest little girl had a seziure during her examine Poor sweety. She&acute;s only two months old and has a severe case of mites, a URI and probably a fungal infection. I&acute;ve brought her home to nurse her back to health.

The car ride was fine. I didn&acute;t even need to do the double decker. My car is bigger than I thought.

<GULP!> I&acute;m sooooo sorry, I didn&acute;t know that to refer to the color brown wasn&acute;t in good taste...let me try to explain what colors the 2 pigs I&acute;m babysitting are again....a-hem...
the larger, more social one is a lovely taupe color with interdispersted black hairs throughout it&acute;s short coat
the smaller one is a wonderful warm, shinny orange with longer but still flat laying hair,
please cut me a little slack...I&acute;m totally new to being a surrogate piggy Mom & just want to figger out how to get these guys into a better living condition before the real owners show up & want them back!
Boy are they in for a surprise...they will have some pages to read up on & a few well placed &quot;talks&quot; about responsibility in animal care!
Fig

The baby with the mites and seizures. PLEASE!!!!!!!!!! Get LymDyp from the vet and sponge her down once a week for a month. For a pig the dose is 1 tablespoon to 2 cups of warm water. It stinks and will turn her fur yellow for a few days. But once the seizures start, trust me Ivermectin alone will not cure her. You don&acute;t need to soak her, just dampen her all over from her head back. And she can hide in a warm cozy to dry.
I know LymDyp smells awful, but it works better than anything!

This info is from Dr Kathy Quesenberry from the AMC in NY. She finally cured Herbie with this stuff, after two years of seizures.

Hi Donna, thanks for your suggestion. I&acute;ve not heard of LymDyp and would like some more opinions.

Anyone???

Everything I&acute;ve read says that Ivermectin alone WILL cure it, although it may take several doses. She&acute;s had her third dose and is going in for a fourth this weekend. Poor little girl - her entire body is covered in scabs. I guess scabs are good because they indicate healing, right? How people can let an animal get like this is beyond me.

Scruffy hasn&acute;t seizured (that I know of) since that one incident. She is getting braver about coming out of her box to explore her cage. I felt a breakthrough this morning when she came out to watch me prepare her breakfast - she&acute;s never done that before and has never even wheeked for food. I look forward to the day when she is fat, noisy and confident.

Oh she is precious! I can only tell you that this started with Herbie out of nowhere. Three different vets, Ivermectin for months, and the seizures got better and less frequent. But never went away. He was having seizures at 4:15 AM, luckily I&acute;m up then. We spent a fortune on vet bills trying to solve this. Skin scrapings, cultures, everything. I even bought my own Ivermectin at $120.00, and they gave me the cherry imulsion to mix it with. Dr Quesenberry is the guinea pig expert in the country. She does seminars for the Exotic Vets. She luckily sees patients now in Westchester, and I took Herbie and the Weebles (they have congenital head tilts) to see her. $125.00 per exam. She gave Herb a shot of Ivermectin, with the prescription for two oral follow up doses 10 days later. Another liqued med for 20 days - a form of Benedryl to stop his itching internaly, and the lymdyp.

Within a week of his first treatment, the seizures were less. After the second they were less, and the third they were gone. He still had the fourth dyp, and when he started to scratch a month later, he got another dyp.

I called Dr Quesenberry, and gave her the results. She was happy, and so were we. She said lots of vets/people don&acute;t use the dyp because it stinks like sulphur. It does and even Herbie hated the smell - but it works!

The other problem is, the seizures weekend the immune system over time. That&acute;s why I think Herb was more affected by the move than anyone else. And it was sad because we weren&acute;t able to save him. He was one special little Love Bug, and I still miss his little smile every morning.

Yeah, it didn&acute;t do much for me, but Riley wasn&acute;t seizing, and he&acute;d been treated for mites. Just dry, very flaky skin. Like I said, it was a try it and see type of thing. The moisturizing nizoral worked better for him.

I am very glad that it worked for Herbie and improved his quality of life, though and if it would work for Scruffy, I&acute;d be more than willing to donate it to the cause. I just wanted Sunny to know I&acute;d give it to her, rather than have her buy it.

The rest of mine is packed to go to Puerto Rico, or I&acute;d send it to her. They use it at the Sato rescue for the dogs. A lot of my leftover meds are being sent there, along with leashes, collars, and whatever else I can come up with.

Hey Miss Karen, when you get a chance e-mail me, tell me how all the kids are doing! The puppy is doing wonderful! She loves the piglets and the chin! Erich cleaned cages for me the other day, and he had to hold each pig for her so she could kiss it! LOL.........